My Overwhelming, Disappointing Foray Into Cryptocurrencies
And what it has to do with tulips, Louis XV, and a vain Scotsman
Cryptocurrencies hit the big time in 2017. The value of one bitcoin, the oldest and largest of what was a rapidly diversifying market, had skyrocketed from $900 on January 1 to almost $20,000 on December 31. Ethereum’s ether, the second-largest cryptocurrency, rose even more sharply, gaining a staggering 10,000 percent over the course of the year, creating somewhere between 20,000 and 200,000 newly minted millionaires.
That’s why, in January 2018 — both for journalistic purposes and out of fear of missing out on the fabulous sums of money to be made — I got out my debit card and sat at the computer, ready to seek my fortune trading cryptocurrency.
It was immediately quite a bit more difficult than I was expecting. There were an overwhelming number of options to trade cryptocurrencies, and they proliferated rapidly as prices rocketed during 2017. The barriers for entry to a lot of these markets were high because of the technical complexity of cryptocurrencies and the need for solid general computer literacy.
There are several tiers of cryptocurrency investing. Most exchanges that take the fiat currencies of dollars or sterling will only exchange them for the…
